"I have a lot of black and Latino friends," she added.
"All my life I have been fighting for
racial equality, for these people.
What about that? Isn't that something?"
"You're still white!" the man shot back.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9943/noel.php
Inside the Black and Jewish Fight Clubs at the Anti-KKK Rally
The Hate That Hate Produced
by Peter Noel
October 27 - November 2, 1999
Determined protesters send a strong message to the Klan.
(photo: Meg Handler)
jittery police captain checked his watch
and straightened his sagging gun belt.
It was 4:20 p.m. last Saturday and the
commander's repeated radio calls for
cops in riot gear had been muffled by
the uproar of a surging crowd.
Although 16 unmasked members of the
American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had
been hounded from Foley Square,
thousands of angry protesters-
feeling cheated out of a showdown
with the white supremacists-
lingered to agitate in the streets.
Some turned on grouchy, steely-eyed officers
-taunting the "Blu Klux Klan" who, they contended,
were all that stood between a multi cultural posse
and "death" to "the lynch-mob murderers."
But in an uncanny twist of events, others, blacks and Jews-
who hours earlier had locked arms in outrage at the
Klan's presence-
suddenly broke into separate fight clubs,
op posing pockets of anti-Klan resistance
that began to menace each other with racist
and anti-Semitic chantdowns,
which almost escalated into fisticuffs.
Tension between the groups erupted after
Jewish protesters tried to confront black
participants about placards they were carrying,
blaming Jews for "the black holocaust"
and decrying "revolutionary alliances" with whites.
These blacks said they felt that Jewish
civil rights activists especially were trying
to co-opt "a black-led struggle" against
the KKK.
"Tell me the last time a bed-sheet cracker
hung a muthafuckin' Jew from a tree?"
asked a black protester who held up a sign proclaiming:
"Niggers, beware of white interlopers.
Fight your own battles."
At the intersection of Chambers and Centre streets,
where a crowd gathered shouting anti-Klan insults,
Maya Paz, an 18-year-old Israeli conscript,
broke through police lines and stormed
after a tall black man in a gray gabardine suit.
Hoisted above the man's head was a
huge placard with a picture of a white
Jesus, asserting:
"The White Man Is The Devil."
(Paz would tell the Voice later she heard
the man make an anti-Semitic remark and
felt compelled to challenge him about it.)
"Get outta my face!"
he sneered, turning his back on Paz as he walked away.
Paz dogged his every move.
"This is wrong!"
shouted the teenager with Chelsea Clinton hair,
who was wearing a trendy Southpark fall coat,
green cargo pants, and dusty army boots.
"I have a lot of black and Latino friends," she added.
"All my life I have been fighting for
racial equality, for these people.
What about that? Isn't that something?"
"You're still white!" the man shot back.
"You don't know me,"
declared the tempestuous idealist,
who must report to the Israeli army by January.
"I don't even consider myself Jewish."
The man turned his back again.
"I had so much to say to him," Paz told a reporter as she propped herself
against a lamp post and began to cry. She felt humiliated by a man she
thought was united with her in the fight against bigotry, intolerance, and
outright hatred in New York City. Now all of her volunteer work surrounding
the interracial mobilization against the Klan seemed to be for nought. "I
came out at 11 a.m.," Paz recalled. "I had been on my feet all day yesterday
trying to bring people here." Maya Paz's appalling en counter with the
African American protester typified the white response to raw black rage.
Some astonished Jews and whites who helped to organize the largely
successful anti-Klan rally walked away teary-eyed and confused. What had
they done to African Americans to deserve this? Will blacks ever stop
blaming them-the other victims?
SHORTLY AFTER THE KKK departed,
Yigal Yavin, a 31-year-old Israeli citizen,
surveyed the volatile scene and picked his battles.
Yavin wandered into a session of the
Hebrew Israelites, a black religious
group known for its often profane
anti-white and anti-Jewish tirades.
The Israelites have preached in the
tourist-packed Times Square area
for much of the last two decades,
and are regularly seen on public-access TV.
But in the last year the group has been
denied sound permits and police have
harassed its members,
forcing them to proselytize elsewhere in the city.
In June, the Giuliani administration agreed
to pay the Israelites $59,000 to settle a lawsuit,
charging that police had infringed on their
First Amendment rights.
On Saturday, with bullhorns blaring,
the Hebrew Israelites rallied in front
of the Court Square Building at 2 Lafayette Street.
n defiance of the KKK,
they hung a stuffed, hooded,
and masked white-clothed doll
from one of the points of the
Star of David.
Yavin approached one of the Black Israelites,
as they are also known, and raised questions
about the group's anti-Semitic sermons.
The Israelite argued that the group teaches
what's in the Bible and speaks out against
white people only because the Bible identifies
them as wicked.
"Forget about your teachings; it's what the Bible teaches.
You're a hoax!" the Israelite told Yavin.
"The same God that took Moses
outta Egypt, he said that you're not a Jew."
"What in your mind is a Jew?" Yavin asked.
"You're all white people," the Israelite re plied.
"You use God's word outta your mouth, okay?
[Jews] don't know anything about God."
"Keep your eyes on God!"
shouted a young white woman who
had been listening to the Israelites
consign whitey to an everlasting hell.
Yavin gave up and left.
But another anti-Klan protester,
who described himself as a Moroccan-born Jew,
picked up the challenge and waded into the group.
His debate with one of the leaders about the
Nazi Holocaust wound up in a shouting match.
The fiercely proud Jew almost had his yarmulke handed to him.
The Hebrew Israelite denied there was a Holocaust.
"My granddaddy died....
He was killed in the Holocaust," the man said.
"Fuck that!" the Israelite responded.
"I'm honest. I don't give a damn if
he was killed in the Holocaust."
Blacks, he added,
suffered worse atrocities than
"the so-called Jews"
but Jews never talk about that.
"Y'all didn't go through no Holocaust!" the Israelite snapped.
"And 6 million Jews didn't even get kilt in that Holocaust!"
"There was a holocaust before that," the man retorted.
"Name 'em!"
"Pogroms?"
"What about them? Pilgrims?"
The Israelite seemed lost.
How much of the Jew's tragic history had he nullified?
When the Jewish pro tester disclosed that one of
his parents is Puerto Rican, the Israelite lectured him
on the Spanish conquest of the island and the evils of
race mixing.
"That's why we got a lot of
Puerto Ricans [who] look like you,"
the Israelite said,
adding, with the same blasphemous tongue,
that the late reggae king, Bob Marley,
was not a pure black man.
"If you look at Bob Marley,
he's the so-called white man," the Israelite said.
"His grandmother was white.
His father [was] a white man."
"There are no winners here," a Jewish protester conceded.
Farther down the street, six young Jewish women
were surrounded by a group of blacks and Latinos,
who included Harlem activist Delois Blakey,
a black former Catholic nun and assistant
to the late Garveyite Queen Mother Moore.
"There has been a lotta dialogue going on,"
said Blakey,
alluding to a heated quarrel that had
broken out among black militants and
white members of the "October 23
labor/black mobilization to stop the KKK."
Of course, the beef was about race.
"Now," said Blakey, updating a reporter,
"they're talking about the differences
between the Jews and the blacks-
the white skin privilege."
Blakey recalled that a black spokeswoman
for her group had lambasted one of the
Jewish women who tried to argue that
the black struggle for racial justice is
similar to some Jewish causes.
"So the question was raised, is she
[the Jewish woman] willing to go back
and bring others that think like her be
cause she
[the disbelieving black spokeswoman]
is not gonna accept her as one," Blakey explained.
Blakey said the entire group also had
de bated the contentious issue of reparations,
"payback [for blacks],
since the Jews [Holocaust victims who
are getting back millions in deposits stolen
by the Nazis] get paid every year."
The argument reached its most volatile pitch
when the Jewish activist said she was only
trying to help blacks overcome white racism.
"We got one Jewish girl over here...."
announced the spokeswoman for the blacks.
"Okay? Let's get it going.
We got five nice Jewish people over here
and a nigger lover that saying they wanna help us.
So let's see if we can git this party started.
We got a Jewish girl over here claiming to help...."
"You know what," the Jewish activist interrupted,
"the second I talk, you shut me down!...
I'm simply saying all white people are
racist and I'm here to show you I'm me."
"Because you're the white nigga?"
her opponent scoffed.
"Fine! So we are," the Jewish activist said.
"But you know what I'm telling you, that I'm here. I'm here!"
One of the Jewish women intervened:
"We really need to scrutinize ourselves
and maybe we'd work a little harder."
"See you at the club tonight,"
a black man heckled.
"See you at the dancehall...."
But the woman ignored him,
pointing out that she understood how
blacks react when they are stereotyped
because she's sometimes tailed in
department stores by people who think
she looks Jewish and is there to steal.
"I'm sitting here saying, I have white privilege,
and because I have white privilege that would
make me white, right?"
She said she has been reaching out to other
"people who are white," telling them it is time
that they admit that "all white people are racists....
The KKK are not the only racists.
There's racists everywhere!"
Nothing the woman said convinced her
black accusers that she felt their pain,
that she knew what it is like to be black in America.
"You have to cleanse yourself, become natural," a black man suggested.
"The white man made you," another protester declared.
"Why do you want me to become natural?" the woman asked.
"What should I do to become natural?"
When the reference to ethnic cleansing
seemed too painfully obvious to ignore,
the woman, tired and sobbing, blurted out,
"Six million people got fucking killed...."
This fight club broke up as police moved in,
ordering protesters to clear the streets.
Back at Foley Square,
three black men tried to remind a phalanx
of battle-ready cops why protesters were
reluctant to disperse.
A black officer said he was only doing his job
and would arrest anti-Klan demonstrators
who behaved violently.
"We're here fighting for you, too, brother,"
one of the black men said.
"We're fighting for all of y'all....
Y'all should never have them [the Klan]
standing on that ground.
We shoulda never let them off the bus....
We're all together now: blacks and whites,
Chinese, Jewish.
We're all together now."
INDEED, ORGANIZERS of the anti-Klan
rally had hoped that New Yorkers would
be united against race hate.
That was the objective.
But when frustrated black protesters began
to vent their rage against Jews and whites,
veteran conciliators began to wonder who
African Americans believe their real enemies are.
Just when bewildered observers were
concluding that the skirmishes signaled
a setback for the fragile black-Jewish
political alliance, a daring Klan sympathizer
yelled "Fire!" in the crowded street theater.
A multiracial mob-
some of whom had been arguing bitterly-
jumped on the woman and began to kick
and punch her.
Some spat on her.
"She said she was the KKK.
She hated Puerto Ricans and the 'black animals,"'
recalled Yigal Yavin,
the Israeli who'd squared off with the Hebrew Israelites.
Another witness said he heard the woman shout,
"Heil Hitler!" and curse at Jews.
For a moment, people noticed,
blacks and Jews were allies again,
countering the KKK hate rhetoric with
a righteous beatdown.
Who said blacks and Jews can't work together?